1. Mike Fink was born at Fort Pitt in present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and served as an Indian scout in his teenage years.
19 Facts About Mike Fink
1. 2.
Mike Fink signed up as one of Ashley's Hundred and formed a part of the band that built Fort Henry.
3.
Mike Fink laid up his boat near us, though he generally had two boats.
4.
Mike Fink always had his woman along with him and would allow no other man to speak with her.
5.
Mike Fink was sometimes a subject for his wonderful skill in marksmanship with the rifle.
6.
Mike Fink would have her hold on the top of her head a tin cup filled with whiskey, which he would put a bullet through.
7.
Mike Fink did not operate keel boats on the Ohio but on the Great Miami River from the Ohio River to Fort Loramie, where portage was made to the Maumee River in order to continue going on up to Lake Erie.
8.
Timothy Field in 1829 said that in a drunken stupor, when aiming at a mug of beer from the head of his longtime friend, a companion named Carpenter, he shot low; shortly thereafter, his other longtime friend, Talbot, retaliated by killing Mike Fink, using Carpenter's pistol.
9.
The recorded exploits of Mike Fink featured mostly in American broadside ballads, dime novels, and other subliterary texts from before the Civil War era.
10.
Mike Fink appears frequently in stories involving the Davy Crockett cycle, but Fink lacked Crockett's more admirable traits.
11.
Over time, the unlikeable features of the character came even more to the forefront, and Mike Fink was portrayed increasingly as a bully who got his comeuppance.
12.
In 1955, Mike Fink appeared in two episodes of the Davy Crockett miniseries of ABC's Disneyland opposite the popular Davy Crockett.
13.
Elements of the Mike Fink legend were present in Walt Disney's rendition, but the character was played mostly for laughs as a foil for the infallible Crockett.
14.
Mike Fink appears in Eudora Welty's parodic fairy-tale The Robber Bridegroom.
15.
In Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker, an alternate version of Mike Fink appears in every novel after the first.
16.
Mike Fink is played by Forrest Tucker in the 1977 made for TV film The Incredible Rocky Mountain Race, in which Fink is pitted in a rivalry against Mississippi riverboater and future author Mark Twain in a cross-country scavenger hunt, although the real-life Twain was born twelve years after Fink's death.
17.
Mike Fink is a prime character in the 2007 young-adult historical novel Mississippi Jack by Louis A Meyer.
18.
Mike Fink is portrayed as a large, hairy, loud man who constantly boasts about his many feats in life.
19.
Mike Fink is first met while traveling down the Allegheny River and is later seen in Pittsburgh, where he is put in jail for fighting.